Michael Warwick - How to Survive School: A Practical Guide for Teenagers, Parents and Teachers

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Copyright 2016 by MichaelWarwick

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First published in the UK by Florence May Publishing in 2016

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Michael Warwick 2016

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ISBN 978-0-9956532-0-7

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Edited by: Catherine E Oliver - www.oliver-editorial.com

Illustrated by the author

Cover design: Florence May Publishing

My guiding st ar .

&

T o the communities of students, parents and teachers who make this w ork possible.

Everyone has been made for some particular work, and the desire for that work has been put into every heart.

Rumi

Thanks to all of the people who encouraged the making of this book. There are too many to mention by name, but some must be given special thanks: Danielle K W atts for life-changing advice and guidance. Ayse Enver Y usuf for championing Exam Magic and asking for more and better resources for her students. Jim and Sharon Adams for their enthusiasm and support. Scott Cohen and Liviu Babitz for their friendship and expertise. Vikki and T ob y Skinner for going o ve r the manuscript with a fine-tooth c omb . Seth Godin for responding to my emails. Nick T roop for coffee, cakes and data crunching. Sherife T a yfun for walking the talk and lighting the w a y. Louise Barnard for her brilliantideas. My parents for believing in me. And of course Chiara DAnna for her love and patience.

Most of all I want to thank all of my students for chal lenging and motivating me to bring my best self to school.

Mi c hae l W a r w i c k

Do you have exams to take?

If youre worried that youmight not get the exam results you want, youre not alone. Thisbook came about because a teacher wanted to help his students stopworrying and get the best exam results possible.

Lets start with an obviousfact; at least, its obvious once you see it. Do you realise thatexams are not passed in the exam hall?

Exams are passed in yourbedroom, or at the kitchen table or in the library or online, andin your classroom with your teachers. Wherever you do thepreparation and study is where the exam is passed. The better thepreparation, the better the exam results.

Imagine that you are a musicianor an actor and you have to perform a new song or play in front ofan audience. Would you practice before you went on stage? Of courseyou would.

The problem with practicing orstudying for exams is that weve all got plenty of other thingswed rather be doing. Plus theres the fear. We have fears anddoubts about how our exam results could affect our future and aboutour ability to pass the exams. On top of it all, its not nicefeeling judged.

Lets put it another way: Doyou accept that preparing for exams is the best way to pass them?If so, then we need to be honest about what gets in the way ofdoing that effectively, and then we need to use strategies toovercome those obstacles. Thats what this book is for.

Here's how this book came intobeing: I was running an Exam Magic programme in a school andeverything was going very well. The school liked the work so muchthat they asked me if I would take the whole of the upper schooloff timetable for the afternoon and do something with them. Ishouldve said no. The interventions I deliver have been developedand tested over many years so that they work. To attempt anuntested workshop with so many students, for a whole afternoon, wasfoolhardy, but I was eager to please, so I agreed, coming up withthe idea of the groups writing a book together. The students wouldidentify all of the problems that they are grappling with and thenwork in teams to come up with strategies and solutions to solvethem.

What I hadnt realised was thatalmost a third of the students in the room were feeling veryvulnerable and in some cases overwhelmed by the pressures ofschool. Many students were not, at that moment, able to access theresilience needed to go through the process I was facilitating, andI hadnt thought the idea through sufficiently to support them withit.

A significant number ofstudents disengaged from the work, and as the room lost momentum, Ibegan to wobble.

A lot of teachers go throughthis kind of thing. You start to sweat, and sometimes you hear yourown voice as if its coming from outside of yourself. It can feellike rolling a boulder uphill when the group energy splits likethis. I actually got so flustered that I mistimed the workshop andfinished ten minutes early, by which point Id lost the wholegroup, and because we were using lots of paper and pens, the hallwas a mess.

To make it even more fun for myego, there were staff from the school in attendance who seemed tome to be watching in horror, but not really helping out. I was,after all, meant to be the big-shot expert from London!

In the end, I felt like thesession went so badly, I just wanted to put the whole thing behindme and forget about it. I took all of the work the engaged studentshad made and stored it in my basement at home. The fact that I hadpublicly announced the intention to write a book slipped mymind.

Some months later, I attended alarge motivational event with a very well-known British speaker. Heannounced from the stage that if anyone would read three books, hewould personally mentor them free of charge. I took him at his wordand read all three books. I got a lot out of the experience, andIm thankful to him for that, but when I contacted his secretary toarrange the mentoring, I was met with a bemused comment about thespeaker often getting carried away and saying all kinds ofthings from the stage.

At first I was angry and feltcheated. How could anyone be so irresponsible? Then I realised thatI had done a very similar thing. What a valuable lesson. I vowedthen and there always to keep my word, and so down I went into thebasement and up came the students worksheets. I began to piecethis book together from their insights, adding ideas of my own frommy experience of over a decade running workshops to help youngpeople make the most of their education.